resizable components

resizable components

I'm having a hard time thinking of use cases where the resizable components would improve usability / add funtionality to web apps. The samples on the blog do illustrate that the resizable components are "neat", but how are people using this to improve thier web apps?

The resizable text area in this forum for posting really doesnt improve the usability. What was the motivation behind creating these components? Can you list some use cases where they would be really useful?

I think this textbox is prime example. I frequently create long responses and for me the resize is manditory.

Beyond that, other uses could be to resize a dialog (like BasicDialog uses it) or you could use it to create time periods like google calendar (user and drag and resize time blocks), or suppose you want to give users to specify their preferred avatar size by scaling their avatar with the resizer instead of inputing pixel values, or ....

Or, go hogwild and build out a complete image resizing/cropping tool that sends the necessary values to a server-side script to process the image and create a new one per the user's actions.

Thats exactly where ill use it for in my current project. How many times i have thought that when adding images to a cms or crm it would be great to modify the images to your preferred width and height and with the exact cropping before you store it in the DB.

How many times i have thought that when adding images to a cms or crm it would be great to modify the images to your preferred width and height and with the exact cropping before you store it in the DB.

This is offtopic, but we currently allow users to manage their image library and they can create derivatives of an original they've uploaded. They make these derivatives using a flash app we had made that I'm not entirely pleased with. Perhaps we'll offer to the client to rebuild the resize bits using yui-ext and the resizable class.